My own main take-away from Redfern’s book is the sure but uneasy realization that that topics most likely to be ridiculed by the authorities are also the very things the government privately seems to consider most interesting.

For instance, the word “Yeti,” which is the name for a creature similar to Bigfoot in Nepal, has become almost a standard synonym for “joke” in today’s media, and is often used in police logs in a denigrating manner when people dare to report sightings of unknown, upright animals. And yet, Redfern demonstrates over and over again that our government has had a long and abiding interest in these creatures for many decades, beginning with a statement from the U.S. Embassy in Nepal in 1959 that decreed any photographs or other evidence found of a Yeti must immediately

be turned into the local authorities, and that any news reports were required to undergo government scrutiny before release to the public. Redfern includes a photo of the document lest anyone doubt.

Redfern has found equally appalling scenarios and cases of government programs involving other “extraordinary animals” from werewolves to dinosaur-like creatures. There’s a lot more to some of these cases often dismissed as mere conspiracy theories than I, for one, ever knew. He also follows certain common threads, such as the appearance of orb-like lights that seem to link many of these closely surveilled phenomena.

Readers of my work know that one of my abiding interests has been the fact that mysterious, sometimes phantom creatures keep appearing to thousands of sane and credible people for unknown reasons. Monster Files points us in many new directions in the search for these reasons, and may just begin to explain some of those “Unexplainables.”